Book review: New book on The Association provides a different look at pop music of the ’60s

Ed Symkus More Content Now

Saturday

May 2, 2020 at 5:51 PMMay 2, 2020 at 5:51 PM

If you can remember hearing the catchy strains of “Along Comes Mary” by The Association back when it first hit radio’s top 40 stations, wow ... you’re old! If you’ve never heard of The Association, you’re either too young or haven’t been properly schooled in the pop music of the 1960s.

“Along Comes Mary,” the group’s first major success, reached No. 7 on the Billboard charts in June 1966. Before that decade was over, the six-member California group would follow it up with four more songs in the top 10, including two that hit the No. 1 spot - the moving ballad “Cherish” and the bubbly “Windy.”

The group had a roller coaster of a career, with bandmates coming and going, and new faces regularly appearing. They broke up, they got back together, their recordings went gold and platinum, they sold a combined singles/albums total of more than 70 million records ... and they’re still together, albeit with none of the original lineup.

Vocalist and rhythm guitarist Russ Giguere (pronounced jig-air) has a new memoir, “Along Comes the Association,” that delves, casually and entertainingly, into his life before, during, and after his time as part of the band - he retired from performing with them in 2014 - and provides peeks into the lives of the other guys in the group, and various people and situations around all of them.

The mid-’60s was the beginning of the age of psychedelia, especially on the West Coast, where Giguere, an up-and-coming folkie, joined the folk-rock ensemble The Men, making them a 13-man group. Creative differences led to a split-up, with six of them eventually setting off on their own, flipping through a dictionary for a band name and stopping at the word “association.” They found new songs they liked, they wrote a few of their own, and they soon came up with complex and polished arrangements featuring shimmering six-part harmonies. They kept their hair relatively short, and maintained that clean-cut image by wearing suits onstage, and the flavor of their music stretched from folk to rock, from upbeat pop to schmaltzy ballad, and even touched onto some of that psychedelic sound.

Giguere, co-writing with author Ashley Wren Collins, keeps the book chatty, gives it an up close and personal atmosphere, and maintains it, whether telling about his difficult childhood, his first visit to the legendary Los Angeles club The Troubadour, his annoyance at The Association being labeled a “sunshine pop band” (“We made art,” he insists. “And we made it well.”), and whether or not “Along Comes Mary” is really about marijuana.

Giguere, 76, shares his own story from memory, pointing out that he’s telling his version “as it comes to me,” and self-deprecatingly admits, “I do like to smoke a little weed, so it’s best if I tell you (the story) now, since I might be occupied later and can’t promise I’ll remember what it is I wanted to tell you.” Much of the book consists of discussions he had with other members of the band, and bits of newspaper clippings about them.

There are insightful revelations. The group approached everything democratically, voting on which songs would make it to their albums. There’s an explanation of the differences between being entertainers on the road (at one point doing close to 250 concerts a year) and creating new music in the studio. And there’s some filler. The book would get along fine without Giguere going into descriptive details of a house he almost bought or the time he bumped into the queen of the Netherlands in a hotel.

There are also wonderful tidbits, ranging from the revelation that Jimmy Webb wrote the song “MacArthur Park” for The Association, but they turned it down, to Giguere’s stories of his brief romances - back in the day - with Helen Mirren and later with Linda Ronstadt. But it’s kind of painful to read about the tensions that rose up between members of the group from time to time, and it gets a little tiring to keep seeing variations of “but more on that later.”

In the end, “Along Comes the Association” isn’t a straightforward look inside the band or the times. It’s more of a freewheeling, fun-to-read account of both, filled with mostly fond memories. Giguere and Collins neatly sum it all up, near the book’s final page, with a statement concerning why the band was a success.

“All it really boils down to,” they write, “is the lasting power of the beauty of the music. That’s all you’re left with - it’s what you remember and take with you - it’s what keeps us going and keeps people coming back.”

“Along Comes the Association: Beyond Folk Rock and Three-Piece Suits” is published by Rare Bird Books.

CORRECTION: After this review had gone to print, it was discovered that Russ Giguere is not the only surviving founding member of The Association. Terry Kirkman, Red Bluechel, Jim Yester, and Jules Alexander are also still with us, and Alexander and Yester continue to lead Association performances.